A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order.

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Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second.

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You don't make a movie, the movie makes you.

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I make film to make time pass.

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To me style is just the outside of content, and content the inside of style, like the outside and the inside of the human body - both go together, they can't be separated.

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Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.

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The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something
between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both
gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my
films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start;
the cinema doesn’t.

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It's not where you take things from — it's where you take them to.

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In my cinema, there are never any intentions. It's not me inventing this
empty auditorium. I don't want to say anything, I try to show, or to
get feeling across, or to allow something else to be said after the
fact.

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The truth is that there is no terror untempered by some great moral idea.
* All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl.

I consider myself as an essayist, I make essays in the form of novels or
novels in the form of essays: only I film them instead of writing them.
If the cinema were to disappear I would move on to television, and if
television were to disappear, I would go back to using pencil and
paper. -- Jean-Luc Godard